Eric Arnow has his own web site now. For years I've been putting his
letters from Asia here. From now on they'll go on his site, the
Bumble Buddhist which
also now has all the previous ones from cuke and photos more. - dc

With an extra day or so before the abbot returned to
Wat Tam Wua, and some unfinished things to do needing the internet, I left
for a couple of days, during which time I visited a friend

(I'll call him "Frank", since I didn't ask if it was
OK to speak directly of him.) living in a village with his fiance, a Lisu
woman.

In Northern Thailand's less developed hill and
mountain areas live a number of "hill tribe" ethnic groups one of which is
the Lisu. I thought it would be a good idea to see what was up with them,
and see what Frank is doing.

We met on a bus that goes on the winding roads
between Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai.

He has lived in wild places for much of his life in
the US and is definitely counter culture, a 40+ year old, who has been to
the Burning Man and Rainbow Family festivals, which are sort of scaled
down versions of Woodstock I guess, never having been to any of those.

Anyway, he likes loose fitting natural cloth pants,
and designed his own with very broad legs and wide open crotch for free
movement. He says that anybody can wear them but his big market seems to
be women into things like belly dancing, and artist type and gay men.

They are made out of hemp with hand woven silk, some
new, and some from old hill tribe clothing that he takes apart and applies
to the hemp main body. They are quite striking.

He pays the Lisu women to hand sew them for about $10
a pair--better than most jobs except the ever present sex trade--.

He hopes to sell them for about $100 here in the US.
So his mark up is much less than the big profits that sweat shop makers
like Nike or Gap.

I had breakfast with him a week ago in Pai, and his
24 year old Lisu girlfriend showed up.

A lovely young lady, he is very lucky to have found
her.

His view is that Lisu women are far more authentic
than the materialistic Thai women, and that the Lisu culture is also more
authentic. It is based on a foundation of ancestor worship and animism,
which loosely put is the belief in the "aliveness" of spirits in the
natural world.

Probably not too different from the ideas of other
indigineous cultures.

And like many indigenous cultures worldwide, their
culture's very existence is threatened by modern civilization and its
money based system. We saw how the Native American culture was decimated
over 4 centuries. A friend told me recently that he saw a Native American
man in a reservation he visited recently, wearing a T-shirt with 4 Indians
with Rifles.

Emblazoned on it were the words, "Fighting
Terrorism.........................

Since 1492"

The Indians coped with their ongoing extinction by
adopting new belief systems like the Ghost Dance, which they believed
would make them invulnerable to the Cavalry's bullets. Unfortunately they
were dead wrong. But maybe one would hope that they did at least go to a
"happy hunting ground".

Many also gave up wholesale their native ways and
adopted the ways of the White Man, though that has given them precious
little respect. Especially if they, like Ward Churchill, voice opinions
that hit too close to home.

Like the Native Americans, some Lisu are adopting new
belief systems. One of these espouses the idea that a great god
impregnated a humble earth maiden without sex.

The child of that union was born in very poor
circumstances but did get predictions of a great future. The story gets
vague, but then years later, the child, now grown, appeared to have great
powers, got a large following, distributed free health care and free food
for the poor, but got into serious trouble with the authorities for
exposing a big currency scam that robbed the masses and enriched the
elite. They framed him for various crimes, and he was put to death
mercilessly. He appeared though, a few days later, and word is that when
he reutuns again at some unspecifed time, roles will be reversed and the
long suffering masses will get their fair deserts.

Given their oppression and primitive circumstances,
it makes sense that the Lisu would be attracted to such a promise.

I have two views on this. My own observation is that
there is a great deal of authenticity to the Lisu. Frank's girlfriend is
as lovely as you could hope for. Her father works his farm diligently,
walking 3 miles to and from his farm every day, at 55 appears to be in
great shape.

But I also see that the people have little prospects.
Many of the prettiest eligible women marry Chinese, Japanese or Western
men. That leaves the young Lisu men without wives and without even a good
command of Thai, much less English, and without even a Thai passport, they
are viewed by Thais like the non white detritous of American society. The
ever present television offers an unreal and unattainable world they have
gotten addicted to, just like many Americans and Thais, for that matter..

In a way I understand it. My friend Frank walked by
three young men outside a house in the village, and joked with them about
their "bachelor pad". Which I thought a pretty sorry joke, since he was
taking one of the best women. They were tipsy and made some snide reply.
But who could blame them?

The women over thirty age quickly, becoming fat and
unatractive, many with rotted teeth or teeth blackened by chewing betel
nuts that give them a kind of nicotine high.

Yet again, there was another Westerner there, a
Vipassana teacher no less, married to a 40 year old LIsu woman, who sees
the Lisu as enormously spiritually developed people whom he regards as his
teachers.

Regarding ancestor worship, think of our Founding
Fathers, who could do no wrong, even though many of them were slave
traders and speculators who treated the people who fought and bled in our
own Revolutionary War as chumps. Are we that much different on this
holiday weekend?

This from The Daily Reckoning Website:

George Washington, who recalled not being able to pay
the troops, and America's first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander
Hamilton, decided that the nation had to clean up the financial mess
left in the wake of the continental notes. Hamilton came up with a
proposal that the new federal government assume the underlying
obligations of the continentals, originally backed by state
governments. In 1790, Congress passed the Assumption Act, by which
the federal government assumed the payment of the state debts
contracted during the Revolutionary War. Under the act, formerly
worthless continental currency and scrip would be "assumed" at face
value by the central government.

From the time that Hamilton's assumption plan was
first suggested, the otherwise worthless continental paper had been
rising in price as speculators acquired it for pennies on the
dollar. As passage of the Assumption Act looked more and more
likely, the value of continentals rose toward par. However, in the
more remote regions of the country, many people were ignorant of
this development. Taking advantage of this situation, the moneyed
interests of the East Coast cities, not a few of whom were members
of Congress or their relatives and business associates, sent agents
into every state and county to buy up the old continental paper
before large numbers of people began to understand its value. In
order that as few of the continental notes as possible should be
left on the table, the speculators employed couriers and relay
horses to reach the most isolated areas. The result was a swindle of
truly national proportions, which economic historian C.M. Ewing
called "the greatest financial atrocity in our national
history...The rich were made richer and the poor made poorer." (He
wrote this in 1930, as the Great Depression was beginning to
unfold.)

Treasury Secretary Hamilton then proposed that the
new federal government raise the revenue necessary to pay for its
repurchase of the continentals at face value by levying federal
excise taxes. Some of the most significant of these taxes fell on
the backs of many of the very same people who had parted with the
continental notes at great discount some months before. In
particular among Hamilton's proposals for raising revenue was a tax
on whiskey, a staple of life along the Western frontier.

As we will see in another article, this "whiskey tax"
compounded the sentiment of many people that the new federal
government was simply the replacement of the British king by
swindling, moneyed East Coast speculators. In today's world, in
which American taxpayers routinely part with 40-50% of their income
in the form of federal, state, and local taxes, it might seem
strange that the collection of a tax on whiskey would usher in a
defining episode in the history of the United States of America. But
absent that tax and the rebellion that it sparked, the United States
of America would be a very different nation.

Byron King is
a graduate of Harvard University and currently serves as an attorney
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a contribting editor
to the groundbreaking free e-letter called Whiskey and Gunpowder.

So you see that average people have been scammed for literally
centuries. And money is the ultimate scam. Lisu women marry outsiders with
money, since their own men cannot support them. But what of the long term
effects if the male Lisu are effectively marginalized?

I think the Lisu may be the canaries in the cave. They struggle
economically and culturally, but most Americans carry large debts that
could drag them down too. Or with downsizing, people in the US are working
harder to make less. So everywhere it is the same just on a different
scale.

With the Lisu having no control at all, it is going to be extermely
difficult for them to maintain their culture, unless of course, the whole
system of money has a major crisis. This is not out of the realm of
possibility, as the war based world economy especially the US goes deep
into both monetary as well as karmic debt.

The Lisu and other indigenous people who know how to live off the land
may yet have the last say in who lives in a world that runs out of oil.